Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing Ben Freeman.
He recently wrote this piece for TomDispatch.com, which, of course, we reprint just about everything Tom runs at Antiwar.com as well.
It's called The Military Industrial Jobs Scam, and it was co-written with Nia Harris, Cassandra Stimson, and Tom as well.
You know how Tom does his introductory couple of paragraphs at the top there.
Anyway, under Tom's name at Antiwar.com, The Military Industrial Jobs Scam.
Welcome back to the show, Ben.
How are you doing?
I'm good, Scott.
Thanks for having me on again.
Very happy to have you here, and your name's getting around.
You did that work last fall about the Saudis and how easy it is for them to buy a genocide in Yemen.
Low, low prices in Washington, D.C.
Clearing sale on that going on right now.
People really noticed, and I've seen you write quite a few good things since then.
Anyway, congrats for that.
I'm glad to see you doing such great stuff.
This one is no exception, and you're picking right at the prime target here, at least outside of the Pentagon itself, and that is Lockheed.
Lockheed Martin Marietta slash whatever all it is now.
And the president's new best friend, their CEO, huh?
Yeah, they've got this.
I mean, it's ironic to have another president being courted by another Maryland, but they've been best buddies this past month.
And in what way?
Tell us about them palling around and what's going on there.
Yeah, they spoke together at a couple factories in the Midwest, of course Lockheed Martin factories, and almost kind of like a buddy comedy up there on stage together.
They also helped to, quote-unquote, save some jobs at a plant that Lockheed Martin was going to close, and Trump basically said, you know, keep the factory open and, you know, we'll make it worth your while kind of thing.
So they kept the factory open.
Trump has also been vetoing bills related to Saudi Arabia and arms sales there, you know, despite a bipartisan majority of Congress saying, you know, we don't want any more arms going to Saudi Arabia.
Trump keeps vetoing these bills, which Maryland used in Lockheed love because they're selling arms to the Saudis by the boatload.
My favorite one was actually the White House itself posted this video on Twitter, where it has Marilyn Yousen on the White House lawn promoting Lockheed's THAAD missile defense system, which is unprecedented in so many ways.
Number one, she's promoting, you know, it's a private company promoting this product on the White House lawn, which is weird enough, number one.
And then they construct this video of it in the White House Twitter account itself, tweets out this video again for a private company.
So, you know, if I'm any other private company out there, I'm going, you know, hey, what the heck about us?
You know, what's so special about Lockheed Martin and Marilyn Yousen here?
Yeah, well, it's that Lockheed only has one customer, the military, and I guess the CIA and whatever other federal government national security departments.
But they don't compete in the market against any companies at all.
They compete only for contracts from the U.S. state.
So that makes them very special.
I mean, even Boeing makes crappy plane, deathtrap planes that they sell out there to the world, you know?
Yeah, that's exactly right.
And what really irked us about it is that you're exactly right.
Like their customer is the federal government.
But one of the big things that they do to keep pitching their products is they say, well, we're jobs creators.
You know, if you give us money, you know, we'll create all of these jobs for you.
And that FAD system was no exception.
You know, the White House touted it as this system creates 25,000 jobs.
Wait, before you debunk that, which is the substance of your awesome, great article here, I want to give you the floor and let you do that.
But I just wanted to emphasize here before you start, too, that Donald Trump is the greatest proponent of this economic doctrine probably in world history.
That our entire way of life depends not on the booty we steal from the countries we invade, but on taxing you to pay these companies to make the weapons we use to kill those people.
Or somewhat to sell to Saudi Arabia for them to use to kill people.
And so we cannot even consider.
I mean, he doesn't say occasionally.
I think once he said, but Iran is in Yemen, which isn't true.
But he had an excuse there.
But the rest of time, he doesn't even bother with that.
The rest of time, he doesn't even cite politics other than the domestic politics of we can't have factories closing.
We need these jobs.
And if the Saudis need these weapons, then that's just the way it is.
Which I don't think any other every other president thinks that way.
But no other president talked that way about how.
You know, yes, you're damn right.
This is the structure of our economy and this is how it must stay.
Right.
I mean, it's the most absurd argument to me because.
And basically what we did, we said, well, we're going to take you at face value, Mr.
And in Maryland, you said and all these other folks who are saying that, you know, these contractors are good jobs creators.
We're going to take you at face value on that.
And we're going to use your own data to test that theory and say, OK, if you're a great jobs creators, then if we give you more of our hard earned taxpayer dollars, then you should be creating more jobs.
Right.
That's that's the basis of their argument.
And so then we looked at their own employment figures, the amount of money that the federal taxpayer dollars that that they got.
And we even went back.
We went back six years on this and we said, OK, you know, what's this look like over time?
And the simple fact of the matter is that they've been getting a lot more money, tens of billions of dollars and more money, in fact.
And they've actually been cutting jobs and not just cutting jobs.
They've been cutting thousands of U.S. jobs.
Lockheed Martin itself has actually been cutting more U.S. jobs while it's been adding jobs overseas.
And again, all of this is according to their own employment figures.
We didn't make any of this up.
We didn't, you know, use any third party sources.
Even we went and looked at these companies, their own tax filings, their own annual reports.
And this is what they're reporting.
So even even using their own data, their argument just doesn't hold up.
Hang on just one second.
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All right, well, let's go through it.
Prove it.
Yeah.
So for Lockheed Martin, for example, when they basically win, when the Budget Control Act, folks might remember this from 2012, when a lot of defense contractors in what we're saying it was a doomsday scenario.
And mind you, the Budget Control Act started from a lot of good libertarians taking a hard look at the national debt and saying that's too much.
We've got to do something about it.
We've got to rein that in.
We've got to rein in spending.
And so we ultimately get the Budget Control Act, which is going to reduce defense spending in non-defense spending by by equal amounts.
And so defense contractors, they say, you know, if you do this, it's going to be a jobs killer.
Lockheed Martin threatened to lay off over 100,000 of its employees.
Then the defense industry as a whole said this could cost us a million jobs.
And so policymakers go through a variety of different mechanisms.
They kind of ease the burden on Lockheed Martin a little bit and all these defense contractors.
And so they actually end up giving them more money at the end of the day.
Lockheed Martin, for example, in 2012, they got about 37 billion dollars in taxpayer money.
By 2018, it was up to around 50 billion dollars.
And so, you know, you look at that, that's an additional 13 billion dollars.
So what did Lockheed do with that money?
You think based on all this rhetoric, they talk about them being a great jobs creator.
You think they would have created jobs with that money?
You'd be actually wrong.
They cut almost 10,000 jobs from their payroll and they actually increased the percentage of their labor force that was based abroad.
So in other words, not only did they cut jobs overall, they actually cut more U.S. jobs and shipped more jobs overseas.
Two countries like Saudi Arabia where they're hoping to start up manufacturing operations there.
And when you say like Saudi Arabia, you mean Israel?
Is that the other one?
Yeah, Israel.
I don't actually know if Lockheed's doing any manufacturing deals with Israel.
They're really involved in the F-35, but maybe that's development and not the actual factories.
Yeah, yeah.
There's big sales of the F-35 to Israel and a lot of countries over there.
I don't think they're manufacturing in Israel yet.
I could be wrong on that.
Yeah, I'm not saying I thought they were necessarily, but at least, you know, I know that they're involved in it.
And that, you know, in terms of whatever, developing whatever technologies for it.
I don't know specifically if it's just software or what kind of hardware, but they talk about it like that.
It's an international project in that way.
Yeah.
And I mean, like the F-35 is the ultimate example of this sort of boondoggle.
Lockheed, whenever they try to sell the F-35 to folks, they always, you know, plot out their charts that says, you know, it creates jobs in almost every state.
I think there's only two states where jobs aren't created because of the F-35, according to their statistics.
And it's almost every single congressional district, too, where they point to jobs being in that district.
And there's a clear reason why they do that.
And it's basically like an implied threat to a member of Congress who would vote against cutting funding for the F-35.
Now, forget the fact that the F-35 is a woefully inadequate plane.
It doesn't work most of the time.
It's really not effective at the missions that it's designed for.
Forget all that stuff.
Lockheed's argument behind the F-35 is that it's going to create jobs in your district, Mr. or Mrs. Congressperson.
And therefore, you've got to vote to keep that money going, even if it's just woefully wasteful taxpayer dollars.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
Hey, guys, check it out.
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You know, this whole thing, this wartime economy or whatever you call it, defense based economic systems, David Stockman calls it the great deformation where you have whatever the market system would look like.
This is the government using so much money to bend the shape of the economy into this certain kind of manufacturing, essentially, at the expense of everything else.
And that's the thing that people oftentimes don't ask about is, well, where would this money gone instead?
And what might it have done then?
Because you can look right at some factory jobs.
I mean, you talk here about them saying that, yep, we're going to close this factory, as you started with Donald Trump's, and we're going to save this factory.
Well, that means a lot to those families of those workers at those factories.
That's their whole world as far as that goes.
But what we don't see is all the families who had that money taken from them and what they might have done with that money.
All of the businesses who got taxed and what they might have invested in, and actually, guess what?
Providing goods and services to people, not just making weapons to kill them and blow up their property and reduce its value.
And you even have an estimate in here about, never mind the typical health education and welfare stuff, as in, what if the infrastructure, what if the government spent this money on other things?
But what if the people had just been able to keep it?
What if private business had been able to keep it and reinvest it that way?
And you say, even calculating in the phony multiplier effect, where for some reason, government spending is so much more beneficial to the economy than real investment, which is a joke.
But you say, even taking that into account, you got some important numbers for us.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
I'm really glad you brought this up, because when you actually study this stuff, and there's been a lot of objective academic research that's looked at this argument and said, OK, you know, if we are going to have the federal government spend some money, you know, where is that money actually effective?
And one of the stats that we have in the piece from one of these studies is that it's about 50 percent less effective at creating jobs, the defense contractor spending that is, it's about 50 percent less effective at creating jobs than if taxpayers were simply allowed to just keep their money and use it as they wish.
You know, if we actually had a free market system where instead of, you know, overtaxing our population to provide to companies like this, and I have some good friends here who, one of the terms they use for this is crony capitalism, because sure, these are private companies, but the reason they're getting this money is because they have these army of lobbyists.
They have folks who've gone through the revolving door, so former members of Congress working for them, former folks from the D.O.D. working for them.
And so it's this kind of it's not the invisible hand that's working here.
This is this is pure cronyism.
Robert Higgs, the great economist Robert Higgs, calls it participatory fascism, you know, where, you know, you can participate in it, you can join your local party and you can run for office.
But the system itself is about these firms, all of which are on the dole, spending a small percentage of that dole, paying their representatives to make sure to keep them in the position they're in.
And it's there's a reason they call the iron triangle.
I mean, you can't break it.
It's just permanently stuck like this until the dollar is finally declared worthless.
Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right.
I think we're we're doing some work right now to tip our hand a little bit on a future piece that we're working on.
It's not just a triangle.
It's it's more of a square.
It might even heck, it might even be a pentagon.
We're looking a lot at think tank funding right now.
And what you really see with a lot of these firms is, you know, in addition to having all these lobbyists and all these revolving door folks, a lot of these big defense contractors, they spend a lot of money.
Donate, quote, unquote, a lot of money to think tanks here, here in D.C.
And those think tanks are writing pieces and reports in testifying before Congress about things that are very favorable to these companies.
And so it's rare that despite how how crappy we know something like the F-35 is, it's actually rare to see a report come out of a think tank here that says the most obvious thing that the F-35 is crappy.
I remember I wrote a report many moons ago when I was working on the project on government oversight about the littoral combat ship.
And I basically said how, you know, folks, the friends that I had in the Navy were they were calling it the little crappy ship even back then.
I wrote a report on it, you know, basically explaining all this.
And I got blasted by all the folks at the you know, the big Goliath think tank.
But it turns out most of them were taking money from Lockheed Martin.
So it's just another way that they have to change the narrative.
And it turned out it turned out the consensus was that you were right, that that boat is completely worthless.
All the different iterations of it.
Yeah.
And that's the consensus now.
They've all had to kind of admit that you were right.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, fast forward seven years later and now, you know, everybody like the facts are the facts on that ship.
But the problem the problem I have the frustrating thing for me is also as a taxpayer in that interim seven year period.
We spent billions of taxpayer dollars on that crappy ship.
That's a danger to every sailor that gets on board.
Right.
And money that we had, as Ron Paul always points out, money we had to borrow from the Chinese to not just our tax dollars.
But yeah, we're borrowing money from the Chinese to build this Navy so that we can prop up all these monarchies in the Middle East.
And all this is in order to spread democracy or something like that.
Let me know when it starts making sense.
But in fact, here's where it starts making sense.
And I forget if you and I talked about this before, but I got to take every opportunity to bring this up.
It's an article by Richard Cummings from 2007, January 07.
It ran originally at Playboy dot com.
But it's right now it's at Corp Watch and it's at my website, Scott Horton dot org and other places.
And it's called Lockheed stock and two smoking barrels.
And it's about how.
Guess what?
All of the most prominent neoconservatives from the first Bush Jr.term, meaning Libby and Pearl and Wolfowitz and Feith and Shulsky.
And Bolton is not really a neocon, but fellow traveler there, Wormser and all of the most important neoconservatives.
All of them had worked for Lockheed.
And the one that was furthest away was Hadley.
But he was a lawyer for the firm that represented Lockheed.
And that the entire shock and awe, which actually did not implement just for historical accuracy.
They did not actually do the full shock and awe.
They did like a third of it or whatever.
But that whole idea that this is how the air war is going to go and all this.
The whole thing was just a Lockheed, you know, video commercial project.
You know what I mean?
This is like their promotional video that they would show to the generals.
And then we use our Javelin missiles.
And it's all just that was what it was.
The project for a new American century was joined at the hip with Bruce Jackson, the Lockheed vice president who had created.
Guess what?
The committee for NATO expansion.
And the committee for the liberation of Iraq.
And so that's the whole thing.
And as Andrew Coburn has said, I think he gives credit to somebody else for this.
But I forget who else to quote for this.
But anyway, and he's been on this case for a long time.
That what really happened was the oil men and the bankers already had the Council on Foreign Relations.
And their big think tank.
But the cowboys, the industrialists, the military industrialists from out West, they didn't have their own intellectuals.
So they made this alliance with the Israel lobby.
And that that is really what the neoconservative movement is.
Is, you know, the intersection of the Israel lobby and the military industrial complex.
And then up sprang a thousand councils on foreign relations all over the place to come up with new excuses for intervention.
And to spend, as you said, to defend the literal combat ship, to defend the F-35, to say that we have to have it.
Yeah, I mean, it's just a phenomenal environment right now.
I mean, in the last month we had Congress agree to a $733 billion defense budget.
Which is one of the largest defense budgets in history.
I mean, it's actually close to the defense spending levels that we had at the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan war.
When we had over 100,000 troops fighting those conflicts.
We have a fraction of that now.
But we're still spending almost as much.
And yet when we passed this legislation earlier this summer, nobody blinked.
And it's sort of a fallacy right now that, well, you know, the Republicans want more defense spending.
And, you know, Democrats, you know, they just want to slash defense spending.
Democrats agreed with this, too.
They just wanted slightly less defense spending.
So not quite a record level of defense spending, but just under a record level of defense spending.
And a big cause of that is, too, a lot of these Democratic candidates, they're getting campaign contributions from a lot of these defense contractors.
They're going to think tanks that are funded by these defense contractors, too.
So there's no real debate right now in this town.
And I'll tell you what's really indicative of it.
My colleague and I, Bill Hartung, we chaired a panel of experts called the Sustainable Defense Task Force.
And we put out a proposal that says, you know, hey, guys, maybe we can actually cut some money from the defense budget and save some taxpayer dollars and still defend the nation.
And it was, you know, we put that out there.
And we were kind of on an island with it.
None of the other big think tanks would put out any sort of piece that would recommend any big cuts to defense spending.
Because all of them, to some extent or another, they're on the take from this industry.
So you don't actually have a real debate about foreign policy in this town.
All right.
So could you do us a favor and talk a little bit about Northrop Grumman and Raytheon and General Dynamics and General Atomics and some of the other guys behind this thing?
Yeah, for sure.
Raytheon is one of my other favorites in this case.
So Raytheon, during the same time period that we were looking at, they also reported cutting jobs as well.
And the interesting thing about Raytheon, too, is that not only did they cut jobs during this six-year period that we looked at of the Budget Control Act, they recently announced a partnership with the government of Saudi Arabia to start manufacturing weapons within Saudi Arabia.
So not only are they already cutting U.S. jobs here, they're basically promising to offshore to ship over even more jobs outside of the U.S. in the future.
And they're, of course, going to make those jobs in Saudi Arabia, where for all the reasons that you've already mentioned, Scott, we should have a lot of concern for what Saudi Arabia is up to.
And we have similar situations with General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, the other big contractors.
Northrop Grumman and GD were actually interesting cases because they added a few jobs.
And so we took a harder look and we said, oh, OK, well, you know, these might be good counterexamples.
But when we actually took a hard look at both those firms, we found out that basically the only reason that they added jobs was because they bought smaller defense contractors.
And so, for example, General Dynamics acquired this company called CSRA and they took their 18000 employees from CSRA and they added them to their role.
You know, a similar situation with Northrop Grumman, which acquired this firm called Orbital ATK.
You take away the jobs from those firms that they bought.
Both of those firms also cut a lot of folks, too.
And so even our research found that these top five firms, they cut thousands of jobs.
If we were, you know, if we accounted for these, we're looking at a total job loss of around 50,000 jobs for these firms, which is extraordinary when you consider what happened in the U.S. economy from 2012 to 2018.
The U.S. economy was booming.
You know, the unemployment rate was plummeting.
People were getting jobs hand over fist.
Yet these companies who we give more and more taxpayer dollars to in that same time period, they were slashing their workforce.
Yeah.
Well, you know what?
That'd be fine with me, especially if they started with the top guys, make them all get real jobs and then let the guys that work at the factory maybe figure out how to make something productive with all those fancy machine tools of theirs.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, unfortunately, what we found was the opposite.
Then not only did they not hire or not only did they not fire from the top or, you know, try to try to get less top heavy, they got more top heavy and they started giving more compensation to the CEOs at some of these places.
And dividend checks to their stockholders, too, right?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Dividends went up.
Stock prices soared.
Lockheed stock price almost tripled during this time period.
The General Dynamics CEO.
Tripled, did you say?
Wait, wait, wait.
Since the start of which time period again?
From 2012 to 2018.
Wow.
So, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
So just for historical reference and time period and this and that.
That's after already living through all of the increases of the Bush years and the first half of the Obama years.
So you're saying starting in the second half of the Obama years till last year, essentially, the stock price tripled.
Yeah.
And specifically, it was at the end of 2012, Lockheed stock price was $82.
And at the end of 2018, it was $305.
And so actually, I was even giving you a conservative estimate.
It's more than tripled.
It's almost a fourfold increase.
Well, and you know what?
When the rest of the market's bubble crashes from all this phony money, we know that they will stay in a perfectly good spot.
They're not going to get their contract cut.
They're going to be the very last ones on the list to have to get a haircut, as they call it, while everybody else is losing their house and their job and blowing their brains out.
Yeah.
Because they're still going to rely on your taxpayer dollars to stay afloat.
Yep.
That's really something else.
Time to end the war in Afghanistan by me.
All right.
Well, you know what?
You mentioned Saudi and we still got a couple of minutes.
Can you can you talk a little bit about Saudi and UAE and some of these new.
Was there a time where they weren't so brave to just have outright, you know, Royal Kingdom owned think tanks in D.C.?
But in the 21st century, it's just all bets are off kind of thing.
Is that it?
Yeah, I think what we're seeing with Saudi and UAE right now is that they're they're taking a full court press approach to influence in the West right now.
They, you know, they frankly have been getting their butt kicked in Congress.
And so I think they're they're being even more aggressive now than they have been in the past.
And we recently learned last week Facebook announced that for the first time they took down a for the first time for Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt.
They took down this influence operation that they were running on on Facebook and Instagram.
And they were they were creating all these fake accounts that they were spreading misinformation.
They were posing as local local newspapers, local media personalities.
They created all these sort of AstroTurf fake events, too.
And they had all these all these fake accounts, you know, going back and forth, spreading all this misinformation about, you know, everything from Yemen, Jamal Khashoggi, all the stuff about Mohammed bin Salman.
And, you know, all these accounts together, they had over 15 million followers.
And so these were huge influence operations that Facebook took down.
But but I think this is really just the tip of the iceberg for what we're seeing with Saudi and the UAE right now, when they're when they're lobbyists here in D.C., can't get the job done for them.
They're going to go to they're going to go to other forms of influence.
They're going to try to get done what they want done in D.C. anyway they can.
Right.
Well, and this is a big part of Israel's influence in America, too, that it's not mentioned as much as all the other interests going on there.
You know, but it's three point eight billion dollars a year that America gives Israel.
That's, I guess, in outright mostly military aid.
But there are other loan guarantees and other things that make it more than that.
But essentially, what's the number?
Is it two thirds or three fourths or something of that money has to be spent back in the U.S. buying weapons?
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
These many of these deals are basically kind of, you know, kickback schemes in a way that will give you money to spend on stuff you have to buy from our companies here.
And, you know, that might sound well and good.
But the again, this is just another form of crony capitalism.
You're basically taking U.S. taxpayer dollars and you're saying to somebody that you have to spend those taxpayer dollars in these private companies.
And, of course, that list of private companies, you know, it's not every private company in the U.S.
They're only a handful of those companies that where that money can actually be spent.
So, you know, if you want to call it a subsidy for those companies or what have you, either way, it's just another way that taxpayer dollars get funneled right back to these big defense contractors.
You know, let me ask one more thing here.
It's not that you wrote about it, but you know so much about this.
What about the influence in the television media?
Because, you know, every Jake Tapper up there have all their presumptions.
That's how they got the job.
They're very much in favor of whatever the military and the intelligence agencies want us to think.
They believe it.
They want to repeat it to us.
And that's all fine.
You see, you know, Northrop Grumman ads on, you know, the Sunday morning news shows and stuff like that.
So, that's some money there.
And, you know, they have a very pro-government, pro-establishment, centrist kind of point of view on everything.
So, that's understandable.
But at the same time, though, it seems like it must really run a bit deeper than that.
In other words, money.
But I guess I don't really see exactly where the transaction is taking place.
You're not making that much money off those Northrop Grumman ads and that kind of deal, right?
And GE doesn't outright own NBC anymore.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, it very much depends on an outlet.
Like, I think with your major outlets, I would worry less about that influence.
But, you know, with some of your smaller outlets, and particularly in DC, we have, you know, a lot of trade publications and, you know, print media.
And so many of these folks who, you know, cover, you know, they're literally called Defense News, one of them.
And so, you know, Defense News, their marketing, you know, comes almost entirely from these big contractors.
So, it's going to be tough for somebody like me to publish a piece in Defense News that says, hey, maybe we should stop spending so much on these contractors.
Because my article might run right next to an ad for Lockheed's F-35.
So, it's going to be very unlikely for Defense News to publish that piece.
And, in fact, they don't publish my pieces.
I've tried in the past and were woefully unsuccessful at getting my work in there.
And so, with outlets like that, I think it's a major concern.
But they do, I know for a fact that they do try to influence the bigger outlets.
I was on Jake Tapper talking about my Saudi influence work a while back.
And I remember a story from him about how the Saudis try to court folks like Jake Tapper all the time.
In the Saudis, for example, they had a box at the Super Bowl.
And they invited Jake Tapper to come to the Super Bowl and sit in their box at the Super Bowl.
But he, of course, declined.
But it makes you wonder how many other big-name news anchors didn't decline.
How many went there and effectively got lobbied by the Saudis just so they could have a nice seat at the Super Bowl?
And it's stuff like that, which you're not going to hear about, doesn't make the headlines.
But it's definitely having an impact on the dialogue in America.
Well, and I know that all of these anchors and journalists need access to their sources.
So, that's a big part of it, too.
But, you know, when people talk about the military, industrial, and then add your hyphens, right, academic and media complex, again, with the universities, there's no question what's going on here.
Here's some money straight from the Treasury right to you for building.
Here in Austin, they're building a new giant warfare center at UT and all of this.
So, you see the direct interest there.
But the media, they seem to toe such a line, and yet the direct connection to the direct incentive has always been a little bit opaque to me.
There's a great quote from Dan Rather saying, hey, nobody needs to send you a memo reminding you when you work for one of these companies that you have great regulatory needs in Washington, D.C., and that you can't get too far out of line to the state.
But it seems like in the corporate structure, there's something I'm missing still.
Yeah, I mean, it could be.
But at the end of the day, these, I mean, especially actually in this media environment that we're in where, you know, so much media can be free now.
And so, there's a lot of pressure.
You know, journalists are being cut at a lot of outlets.
So, there's a lot of pressure to maintain that bottom line.
And so, if folks are getting, you know, big media buys from some of these defense contractors or from foreign governments even, like your Saudi Arabia, your UAE, they're going to take it in a lot of cases.
And as you mentioned, in academia, it's a big issue, too.
I'm hesitant to tell your listeners in Austin that I'm a Texas Aggie alum.
But Texas A&M, interestingly, has a fascinating case going through the courts in Texas right now about their relationship with the government of Qatar.
And Qatar gives a ton of money to Texas A&M, and Texas A&M has a campus over there.
And so, some aspiring journalists in Texas, they wanted to know, well, what's the contract look like for that?
Where's that money going?
And unfortunately, Texas A&M was reluctant to release that information, and the government of Qatar didn't want to release that information either.
So, the case is now going through the courts for the very basic thing of just saying, where the heck is this money going at Texas A&M right now?
And it's going to be an issue that affects a lot of universities, because there's billions of dollars in foreign government money flowing into U.S. universities.
And we really have no idea what that money is buying these foreign governments.
Wow.
So, yeah, I mean, that's a whole other angle.
What do we read about that?
Billions of dollars, you say, of foreign government money coming in.
Yeah, yeah.
And you're not talking about tuition either.
You're talking about massive gifts, so-called, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Big gifts, big research grants, setting up research projects.
Some of it's for those universities to establish branch campuses in these foreign countries.
You know, we know the barest of details about it, but by and large, this is under the iceberg.
I call it an influence iceberg.
This is underwater.
We don't really know what's going on here.
We're diving into it.
We've got a report coming out hopefully later this year or maybe early 2020 on this.
Stay tuned.
I should mention to your listeners, too, check us out at internationalpolicy.org.
You can find all our stuff there.
Okay.
Yeah, we definitely will stay tuned to that.
As you said at the top here, we're talking minimum three-quarters of a trillion dollars a year here.
So, talk about an iceberg.
I mean, man, oh, man.
And I was going to say one more thing about the media there.
I guess it's the institutional shareholders, too, right?
Where you have the same banks who service all of the transactions for Lockheed or the same banks that own 20 percent of ABC or whatever.
I'm making those numbers up, but things along those lines, right?
It's another part of it.
Yeah, sure.
Absolutely.
All right.
Listen, I'm sorry.
You said internationalpolicy.org?
Yes, sir.
Internationalpolicy.org.
Check us out there.
Got a lot of information for you.
And if you like our work, consider a donation.
We are a nonprofit.
We'd love your support.
Great.
And I'm sure some of our listeners will be happy to do so, too.
Thank you very much for your time on the show, Ben.
I really appreciate it a lot.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
Always a pleasure.
All right, you guys.
That is Ben Freeman, and he is the director of the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative at the Center for International Policy.
Again, that's internationalpolicy.org.
And he's the co-chair of its Sustainable Defense Task Force.
And he co-wrote this article with Nia Harris, who is also there at the Center for International Policy.
And they wrote it for tomdispatch.com.
And it's at antiwar.com.
It's called The Military Industrial Jobs Scam.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
And again, read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan, at foolserrand.us.
